David Dollar has a lifelong fascination with the Himalayas.

David Dollar: I'm David Dollar. I'm the Country Director for China and Mongolia for the World Bank based in Beijing, China. I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but my parents moved to Rutherford, New Jersey before I was one. So I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and I spent a quite a bit of time as a teenager going over to New York City, going to museums and movies. I think having a great metropolitan center like New York is a wonderful influence on a child growing up. When I think back about how I first got interested in China and Asia, I think my early interest as a teenager was primarily in natural resources in reading about the wild life, reading about climbing the Himalayan Mountains. I always had this fascination with the Himalayas; but as I was an older teenager the Vietnam War was raging, and I think that was in the minds of people very much at the time. And then the year I graduated from high school, Nixon went to China and there was this great interest in China opening up after a long period of being closed. So I think those combination of factors when I was a teenager first got me interested in China and in Asia more generally.

Recorded on: 7/3/07